Spam by the Numbers for May

p>It seems that no matter what the security experts try, spam levels still manage to go up. Every month Symantec Messagelabs creates a report on email spam that details all spam activity in the world. The most recent report on May’s spam levels are very alarming. According to the report, spam levels in may hit an all time record. Nearly 9 out of 10 emails sent in may were spam messages.

As you can see from this chart, spam levels rose to 90.4% in may. These are the highest levels ever!

On top of these numbers are some interesting reports on the time of day that spam is delivered. It seems that spam mailers prefer to send email during US business hours. This may be because this is when the most internet users are online, or because spammers are living in the US. Unfortunately, there is no real way to tell. The following charts from the report show the number of spam email per hour for the US, Australia and the UK

So, as you can see, we are losing the battle against spam for now. Hopefully, this will change in the future.